At the Daily Caller, John Rosenthal writes, “A workshop hosted by Germany’s international broadcaster urges journalists to abandon neutrality on climate change:”
Germany’s publicly-funded international broadcaster Deutsche Welle held its third annual “Global Media Forum” last week in Bonn. According to the conference website, this year’s event drew some 1500 participants from 95 countries. The topic: “The Heat is On: Climate Change and the Media.”
Like the general heading, the titles of the numerous panels and workshops leave little doubt about the orientation of the proceedings and their unqualified endorsement of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis: “Ideas For A Cooler World – Covering climate protection and possible solutions,” “Media-ting change: The effective use of media to creating societal awareness of climate change,” “From Copenhagen to Cancun – a roadmap,” “Working with nature to tackle climate change,” and so on and so forth. There was even a workshop on “How to make Oscar-winning movies on climate change.”
One workshop, however, sparked particular controversy. Its title: “How to professionally deal with climate skepticism” – or as its German title translates: how to deal with “skeptics.” As the description of the workshop makes clear, “deal with” here is a euphemism. “Let both sides make their point and let the audience sort out what is true” is the traditional “mantra” of journalism, the organizers admit. “But with climate change, things are not so easy,” the text continues. “Falling back on a ‘neutral’ journalistic position can mean playing into the hands of the skeptics at the expense of the basis of life.”
The German version of the description, moreover, leaves even less room for misunderstanding: maintaining journalistic neutrality does mean “playing into the hands of the skeptics” and threatening “the basis of all life,” it asserts. The German version is no longer available on the “Global Media Forum” website, but it can still be consulted in Google cache here.
This isn’t all that new an idea, nor is it related solely to the German media, of course.
Editor & Publisher, the trade publication of the American legacy media similarly recommended that its subscribers junk objectivity when it came global warming way back in 2007. (Literally: the headline was “Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers.”)
Of course, as we saw with their supine and endlessly hagiographic coverage of Sen. Obama in 2007 and 2008, the American media took the notion of abandoning objectivity — not to mention reality as the rest of us know it — to heart on a myriad of issues.
Update: But of course: E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post beholds the “Passion” of John Kerry!
Update: More objectivity abandoned here; and as a result, “Not much love in the comments,” the Professor notes.
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